Case Study — Improving Social Communication on Slack — “Add a Feature” Project
The Brief
The objective of this project was to develop a feature on Slack’s existing mobile platform which would improve social relationships within a company.
App: Slack
Feature: Improve Social Connections
Timeframe: One week
Team: Individual
Platform: Android (mobile only)
Tools: Figma / Figjam / Miro / Trello / Google Forms / Maze
Methodology: Design thinking in an Agile environment
Deliverables: High-Fi prototype
Intro
As a business orientated communication platform, Slack provides a space for businesses and teams to communicate efficiently amongst staff, and quickly came to replace long email threads and calendars full of catch-up meetings.
However, Covid-19 changed the working landscape, and the demand for well defined business communication tools grew overnight. With this, though, so did the way colleagues communicate with each other about social matters, yet platforms such as Slack have not been quick to adapt to this user need.
Therefore, this project aims to begin the process of redressing this balance between social and professional communication at work through Slack.
User Research
My approach to this project was driven by the hypothesis that Slack lacked a social feature that was in demand. However, in order to fully understand the scale of the issue I needed to contact users of Slack to build a better picture of how they communicated socially with colleagues, their feelings, and how they utilised the platform for this, or more widely.
Using a Lean Survey Canvas, I was able to build a Google Forms questionnaire which I could then distribute to both Slack users in my network, and those who use similar platforms in their workspace in an attempt to gather data about the social side of work.
Building upon the results of this, I then developed more in depth user interview questions to help better understand the user journey for their current social needs. Examples of these questions included:
“Do you share any interests in common with your colleagues?”
“What was your process in finding this out?”
“How do you go about sharing a social interest with your colleagues?”
“How did you develop initial social connections with your colleagues when you first started at your company?”
“Does your company play a role in connecting you with people of similar interests and values?”
As a result of both the 21 survey responses and 3 user interviews I was able to build an Affinity Diagram and see exactly how teams currently used the app, how others used similar interfaces for social means, and developed a clearer understanding of the pain points currently experienced related to its social use.
Key Findings
- 76% of people surveyed worked in companies with more than 50 employees
- 72% of people surveyed stated that social connections with work colleagues were very or extremely important
- Yet, 47% worked remotely at least 75% of the time
‘With the new age of remote working it’s incredibly difficult for new people at our company to connect socially, and it’s impacting morale across the company”
— Tom, Senior Manager
‘Remote working can be isolating’
— Mike, UK Representative
‘Death by slack channels. We have far too many channels and it becomes very easy to get lost in the noise’
— Ross, Talent Acquisition Lead
Market Comparisons
Slack’s seemingly strongest competition in this field lies with Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace and Facebook Workplace.
Teams now recognises the requirement for personal information sharing, and has even began marketing the platform for friends and family use. Facebook Workplace is a bridge between their popular social media platform and a place to structure work tasks and conversations. However, Google is an integration of their GSuite apps and as such has not developed specific social connection building features for working professionals.
As a result, these market comparisons suggest that work-based platforms are trending towards a secondary social use, even if this is not their primary goal, and Slack should follow suite.
User Persona
Danny was created as a result of the behaviours and motivations I encountered in my research. Beyond the information offered in the persona itself, I wanted to develop a specific situation with which to help build my user journey map and further focus my design process:
Danny has worked remotely his company for 2 months. He took a picture on a biking trip he went on at the weekend in the Lake District, and he wants to share this with his colleagues — but he wonders where, and when, is best to do this?
User Journey Map
With my design scope narrowed through the user persona, I documented the current user journey through a User Journey Map. This was vital as it clarified both the needs and pain points felt during the user’s journey. Now, the opportunities for where a new feature could be identified, most specifically during the “Find a channel to post the photo”.
It was as a result of this I began to appreciate that there was a definite opportunity to improve the user’s social experience of slack, and add value to the platform’s use.
Slack’s Design Principles
Slack’s first two design principles are:
1. Don’t make me think
2. Be a great host
However, my user research led me to conclude that in the age of remote working they are not meeting expectations on these two fronts.
Firstly, social conversations are growing on the platform, but work channels are becoming cluttered with undefined conversations and tangents.
Secondly, Slack now has a responsibility to connect people professionally and socially, but they don’t explicitly encourage engagement with the latter.
How Might We…
In order to start narrowing down the scope of the project based around these opportunities, and find a specific problem to focus on for ideation, I drafted some how might we statements. I found this as an effective way to gather my thoughts about the process which led to this point:
- How might we help foster social relationships between all employees from day one in a company?
- How might we help people express their personalities and interests in a work context?
- How might we help employees start social interactions without the need to share personal phone numbers?
- How might we relieve the pressure on Slack channels by making a better distinction between social and work conversations
- How might we help people bring their authentic self to work?
Problem Statement
The culmination of my research phase of the project was the following problem statement, which along with the user persona I could use to help keep myself focused on a specific problem to solve during the design phase:
How might we use Slack to help foster social relationships between all employees from day one in a company, and help people bring their authentic self to work?
Caveat: ….while also helping people find a place to engage socially without negatively impacting their work flow?
Minimum Viable Product
With the use of my problem statement I could now begin to ideate and develop solutions which focused on solving the problem whereby Slack lacks the ability to foster good social relationships at work. Due to this only being a one week sprint, I was aware of the time limitations I had with which to create a comprehensive solution, but felt that the following points were needed in my minimum viable product:
- Each Slack personal profile needs to include three #interests
- These #interests are linked to #socialchannels for like-minded people to connect through
- An employee can search for, and join any #socialchannel in order to engage with colleagues from across the company
- You can also view anyone’s profile and link to the channels from there — or message them directly (using a feature which already exists)
With these decided, I created 3 user flows to be able visualise how the new features could be integrated into Slack’s current platform. The below example demonstrates the “happy path” of how a user could find others with similar passions, and be able to share their interests in a specific place:
Low-Fi
Without a design team to work with, the ideation process can be a little tricky — however I attempted to put together some options myself for the various screens. I felt there needed to be a balance between creativity and incorporating any new feature into the current slack design system, and was therefore kept aware of keeping items such as buttons, image size and corner radiuses consistent.
Mid-Fi & User Testing
With the low-fi designs narrowed down to a potentially viable product, I drew up the mid-fi using Figma. This involved a combination of mimicking content or entire pages in Slack in order to try and implementing my new feature idea into their existing design and user flow.
Once complete, I uploaded the designs to Maze for remote user testing, and asked the testers to complete a short task which involved searching for and joining the #photography social channel. I sent the prototypes to those who had completed my original user survey, who I knew were familiar with the current Slack platform.
By analysing the data from Maze, I was able to draw the following conclusions:
Task completion: Direct success — 50% (7 testers)
Still some confusion regarding “Jump to…” as the search function
Join Channel button had a strong success rate once on page — but was inconsistent with the design system
Task completion: Indirect success — 35.7% (5 testers)
“Visit Channel” button from profile page was often missed
Misclicks — Average 14
Lack of interest drawn by some functions and their terminology such as the channel division
There seemed to be a propensity for the users to click on images rather than text links / buttons
Poor communication of task which was confusing for testers
High-Fi
Before jumping into the high-fi design, I produced a streamlined Slack Style Guide to help guide the design and details that would follow.
Then, through my analysis of the heat map data from the mid-fi prototype I decided to make these changes leading into the high-fi design:
- “Jump to…” button to include a search icon
- “Visit channel” buttons to change to image icons, led by the tendency for users to interact with images over text
- “Join Channel” button updated to include name and image to improve cohesion between pages
- “social” and “channel” terminology to change to “Social Channels” and “Work Channels”
Finally, I put together a small design system of Figma before jumping into the high-fi in order to streamline my design process and ensure consistency and accuracy between components across the pages.
Next steps
Outside of the scope of this project was to test the High-fi prototype and iterate the design features further. This would therefore be my immediate next step, along with some face-to-face testing. It would be really interesting to drill down further into the effectiveness of the design features, and continue the iteration process.
Takeaways
Having been given this project I was interested to see whether or not such a feature would be viable on a platform like Slack, which was created solely to improve business communications in a company.
Since undertaking the UX process I now truly believe that there is value to be added to Slack with the integration of simple social design features. There is no doubt from my research that with the shift to remote working, encouraging and offering a specific place to interact socially on a digital platform — even one originally build for a professional purpose — is critical.
